The present inventions is applicable to any situation in which large amounts of data have to be transferred to a computer network. It has particular effects and improvements in the field of streaming ‘new media’ data such as audio and video data as it is increasingly required in business processes and with increasing acceptance of the Internet.
New media data extends traditional computer data formats into more natural data formats for the interaction of humans and computers by incorporating images, motion pictures, voice, audio, and video. Leading market, business, social, and technical indicators point to the growing importance of this digitally recorded content. Latest in 2003, new media data will eclipse structured data in sheer volume.
One of the key problems with new media data is transferring the usually huge amounts of content through a network. Normally, data is transferred using the store&forward paradigm, e.g. the complete content is transferred before anything is done with the data. A prominent implementation of this paradigm is the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the standard way to transfer files throughout the World Wide Web.
For conventional data this works fine, as the amounts of data to be transferred are comparably small. For audio and video clips though, the latency time that passes between a request for rendering and the start of the rendering becomes unpractically long.
For this reason, in recent years a second paradigm called streaming has emerged. Streaming allows the rendering of the media to take place in parallel with the transfer of its content, which reduces latency times to a minimum. Streaming software always operates in pairs, a stream server pumping the data continuously through the network and a stream player receiving the data and rendering it.
Unfortunately, the way streaming is performed today has some serious side effects. First of all, the direct coupling of data transfer and doing something with the transferred data makes current streaming technology only available for special purposes, like rendering. Also, there are differences in handling streaming compared to store&forward, like the requirement of providing metafiles instead of the media itself, or different and proprietary security means.
Further, the correlation between stream server and renderer has led to proprietary protocol add-ons being transferred between them two for tactical reasons, practically preventing the player products of manufacturer A to work together with the stream server products of manufacturer B and vice versa.
Further, prior art streaming technology is restricted to stream data which are stored on the same computer device in which the stream server in use is residing. This, however, prevents streaming from being accomplished from any proprietary data server, as e.g., a DB2 database acting as source of the data stream. This reveals a considerable disadvantage as there is thus a practical constraint to store business relevant data on the streamer hardware platform instead on a higher quality computer system with an increased degree of data security.